For her wedding with Palmiro Madesani, celebrated in Nuoro on 11 January 1900, Grazia Deledda did not choose a traditional white dress, but a silver-lilac dress illuminated with beads. Nothing remains of this dress, destined for oblivion were it not for the intuition of the Isre, the Higher Regional Ethnographic Institute, which decided to commission the faithful reconstruction of the dress, now exhibited in the bedroom of the house. museum of the writer in Nuoro, the same room set up at the time to host the future husband on the wedding day.
It was the professionals of the Image Fashion Institute of the capital of Barbagia led by Giuseppe Pinu, under the supervision of Franca Rosa Contu, former manager of the Isre museum sector, who created the precious artefact thanks to the description of the dress obtained from a small image of the 1987. A careful and painstaking research work, which allowed to replicate in detail the shape, model, fabrics and size of the wedding garment, which is described by Deledda, the only Italian woman who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in a letter to her husband : "The lilac silver dress will be decorated with pearls: imagine the sparkle; I will even dull you, unless you too wear shoulder pads and that terrible saber of which I am so afraid".
The work of reconstruction of the dress is materially due to the teacher Lucia Cherchi. "It is a taffeta dress - he explains - a precious fabric, traditionally made of silk, with the typical shape of the early twentieth century, the lining in wool and the beads, which have been applied one by one, in a long and tiring work of embroidery, to make it sparkle as in the description by deleddiana ".
"Not a white dress - explains Franca Rosa Contu - but a bright and luxurious dress, complete with gloves and hat to sanction the new status of married woman and established writer. An authentic passport for the new destination, Rome, and for the new life . No trace of this dress remains, probably Grazia used it on special occasions, perhaps to go to the theater, then the fashion changed ".
(Unioneonline / vl)